Avoiding unlawful discrimination against disabled people

Example:

An employer knows that one of their employees is a disabled person. They select employees from the pool on the basis of absence over the past two years. The disabled person has taken a lot of time off work in relation to their disability. If the employer cannot objectively justify this decision, it is likely to be discrimination arising from disability.

A better approach would be for the employer to exclude disability-related absence from the absences used to score employees against that criterion.

Examples of reasonable adjustments in redundancy situations:

• A manufacturer is making some employees redundant. One of the criteria for redundancy is whether someone can operate every machine on the employer’s production line. A disabled person cannot operate one of the machines because of the nature of their impairment. The employer decides it is a reasonable adjustment to the criterion to adjust the employee’s mark so as to ignore the absence of that machine, so they score the same as a worker who has operated that machine to a satisfactory standard.
   
• A worker has a learning disability and the employer is offering voluntary redundancy. The employer provides the worker with the information in Easy Read formats and makes sure that someone suitable spends time explaining the options to the worker.